The multiverse is doomed and even Spider-Man and The Flash can’t save it
Marvel and DC's over-reliance on the multiverse trope leads to cinematic worlds where death has no meaning and every hero or villain can be resurrected
Film Features Flash
Has Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 saved the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Movie-goers loved it—the film is expected to earn around $800 million worldwide, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score came in at 94 percent. Critics were 82 percent positive, and they liked it a lot better than Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (RT critics’ score: a miserable 47 percent), or Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (74 percent), or Eternals (with another 47 percent critics score, proving misery loves company).
By most measures, then, GOTG3 is a major Marvel comeback. There must be champagne and high-fives all around over at Marvel Films, am I right? Not if Kevin Feige is as smart as they say. Because what GOTG3 really confirms is that the multiverse—the whole organizing principle behind the still-emergent Marvel Phase Four multi-film story arc—is box office poison.
You remember the multiverse. It’s a plot device strip-mined for the MCU from old print comics and launched in the Loki TV series on Disney+. It involves ideas borrowed by way of a seventh-grade education in string theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and quantum physics, and it’s all about parallel universes crowding each other out of existence.
Lowered stakes and disenchanted audiences
If you’re like most viewers, you actively disliked the multiverse in the fulsomely named Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and you truly hated it by the time the equally tongue-twisting Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania arrived. Possibly that’s because, in the MCU, the multiverse has approximately two functions: it liberates whatever pickup squad of CG artists Marvel has deployed to treat art direction like something Peter Max dreamed up while experimenting with LSD, and it’s mostly a way to lower the dramatic stakes.
Think about it: If there’s potentially another Iron Man out there in the multiverse, and he could be played by Robert Downey Jr., how resonant is Tony Stark’s big death scene in Avengers: Endgame? When Ant-Man and company spend an entire movie taking down a Big Bad like Kang the Conqueror, how much should we care if five minutes later the end credits scene reminds us Kang variants are stocked up like Campbell’s soup cans in the multiversal limbo-land they call home?
The Spider-Verse movies are standalone animated features which, despite a few knowing gags, aren’t supposed to be part of the MCU, and they’re produced by Sony, not Marvel. In fact, Sony was allegedly warned by Kevin Feige during prep on Into The Spider-Verse “not to get ahead of itself” by transforming the Spider-Verse into a setup comparable to anything in the MCU. And remember: the Spider-Verse movies are, amongst other things, comedies, using the multiverse premise to make gags about talking pigs.
That’s a flashing warning light writ large. An old Hollywood adage is that parodies and satires mark the end of a cycle, in the way Blazing Saddles came out when the Western was dying. Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein literally finished off the very first cinematic universe: the Universal horror franchise of the 1930s and ’40s, gunned down by the rat-a-tat slapstick of the schtickmeisters behind “Who’s On First?”
How the Flash opened the door
“But The Flash” you say—and there are reasons to treat the upcoming Ezra Miller Flash feature as a different kind of multiverse saga for the DCEU. For one thing, in the larger sphere of superhero comics, The Flash is considered to be the great hero-protagonist of the whole multiverse premise. “Flash Of Two Worlds” is a 1961 Flash storyline widely acknowledged as the birth of the multiverse gimmick. In it, the 1960s Barry Allen comic book Flash uses super-speeding molecules to vibrate himself onto Earth-2, where he teams up with the 1940s Jay Garrick Flash.
The Flash was also the prime mover in what comics aficionados still believe to be the greatest multiverse arc of them all (as well as a pioneer of the “crossover event,” an approach Marvel Films rode to the bank in MCU Phases One through Three). Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s 1985 DC Comics masterwork “Crisis On Infinite Earths” never made it to the movie screen, but it was tributed in a big way by DC’s TV Arrowverse, especially on (you guessed it) the CW version of The Flash.
It’s instructive to take a closer look at how DC comics utilized the multiverse, though. In “Flash Of Two Worlds,” the multiverse was a nifty pseudo-scientific bridge between two continuities: the original 1940s Golden Era DC Flash books and the rebooted and more enduringly popular Barry Allen variant (the one Ezra Miller is playing).
That teaming opened a floodgate, because DC now had access to its entire dead roster of pre-Comics Code super avengers, to use as plot devices in the contemporary lineup. Over time, there were storylines involving the often scarier and more violent early DC characters like Sandman, The Spectre, or even the Earth-2 Batman (you know, the homicidal one with the guns) as story devices in current continuities.
A creative innovation—or just a way to clean house?
Eventually, it all got out of hand, so a part of Marv Wolfman’s pitch when he conceived “Crisis On Infinite Earths” was about housecleaning; at the end of the saga, the five DC universes had merged into one, taking out a lot of dead weight superhero characters (and the Barry Allen Flash) in the process. The closest analogy may be Spider-Man: No Way Home—a multiverse Marvel movie essentially disconnected from any larger story strategy, created to harmonize Sony’s various non-MCU Spider-Man projects with the current MCU.
A spring cleaning emphasis does not indicate DC is betting the farm on the multiverse the way Marvel has. After Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, though, it would be surprising if Marvel isn’t at least re-evaluating its multiverse strategy—if it hasn’t already. GOTG3 is an old-fashioned closer—the capstone to a trilogy of movies in the way Return Of The Jedi or The Dark Knight Rises also were.
When the GOTG3 storyline ends, our troop of space mercenaries has splintered, and while there may be more adventures to come, the original collective’s race appears to have been run and there don’t seem to be multitudes of Star Lords waiting for their cue. And that’s really how it should be. Because admit it. You’re already sick of the multiverse—and that means it’s not the sort of thing to build the future of an entire cinematic universe on.
126 Comments
How can you be sick of something that just started? The Multiverse is one of the biggest aspect of both DC and Marvel…not sure it is a “trope” and just not a aspect of the genre.
Right? How can you call it “over reliance” when they’ve only just started using it?
Doctor Doom And The Multiverse Of Madness (Marvel)Huh… that’s new. I mean, not the lack of copy editing, of course… :p
I’m still hoping for the little known, but legendary in some circles, sequel script Doctor Detroit and the Multiverse of Mom to be dusted off and finally produced.
You’re lucky I’m old enough to get that reference! 🙂
In movies in which time travel, alien technology, and magic all exist, there are infinite ways to bring characters back from the dead. The multiverse is just one of those ways. But if a movie sets its ground rules properly, you can have emotional stakes even with all those magical caveats. Inception was very clear on this: if you die in a dream, you die for real. It’s just up to the storytellers to tell the audience how death in this world works, and then stick to it. Also, when Tony Stark died in Endgame, it was indeed moving. But he appeared as a hologram in the VERY NEXT SCENE. I felt a little cheated as a moviegoer, like “Guys, we JUST saw him die. Wait til the end credits at least.”
In fairness, I clocked that error and thought to myself “C’mon guys, it’s Dr. Fate”
That’s the movie I saw. What dimension are you in?
Isn’t the use of the Multiverse in the Flash basically so they can remove whatever aspects of the DCEU they wanted to from continuity (e.g. now Henry Cavill has never been Superman.) It’s always been part of DC Comics DNA to do explicit retcons through time travel, a Crisis, Hypertime, etc. Whereas Marvel generally just prefers to memory hole the stuff they don’t want anymore.
Because what GOTG3 really confirms is that the multiverse—the whole organizing principle behind the still-emergent Marvel Phase Four multi-film story arc—is box office poison.Except for Spider-Man: No Way Home right? Because that movie made nearly $2B?
And Dr. Strange 2 made nearly a billion on a budget of a 1/5 of that.
multiverse of madness made more money than gotg3, as well.
Have to believe at least a little bit of that revenue was based on hearing Patrick Stewart’s voice in the trailer and the possibility of some truly wild Illuminati cameos.
In other words, the Multiverse sells.
What it really confirms is that bad movies are box office poison and good films aren’t (although even that isn’t always true … coughTransformerscough). But anyway …-GOTG is (I’ve heard) a good movie with popular characters. -MVOM was a so-so movie with less popular characters. -No Way Home is a good movie with an extremely popular character-Spiderverse is a good movie with an extremely popular character-Quantumania isn’t even really about the multiverse (and also isn’t very good)
“Because admit it.”
Ah, clever reveal that you were trolling all along.
Another sign you’re n0t dealing with a great rhetorician is when they start a statement of pure opinion with “Think about it.” As if the only possible source of disagreement could be that people just aren’t thinking and it’s your job to set them straight.
This article seems to be bending over backwards to explain why its premise isn’t totally undermined by the massive success of Spiderverse. But then the MCU examples given don’t make much sense either. Ant Man 3 has very little multiverse shenanigans, and Eternals had none. On the other hand, Spider-Man No Way Home and Everything Everywhere were both all about multiverse silliness and we’re massive critical and commercial successes. There are potential storytelling issues with multiverse movies, but the idea that they’re box office poison is demonstrably untrue at this point. There are much more obvious reasons for Marvel’s mixed fortunes of late.
Funny how they don’t mention Loki, which many regard as the best Marvel TV show, and embraced the multiverse more than anything else they’ve done. It seems like the Doctor Strange and Ant-Man movies just weren’t very good regardless of their multiverse content.
…Funny how they did mention “Loki”.
Bro, I didn’t read the article! What is this, Playboy?
Loki was awful.
Yeah I detested Loki. But part of that or me was the way they used the multiverse concept in the most meaningless and thoughtless way possible.
Agree. It was astonishingly small-minded. They told a show about the ultimate trickster who never actually ever tricks anyone. Huh?
Yeah. OG Loki’s role in the narrative was to stand around befuddled, making reaction faces to what was going on. It was so tiresome. And they did absolutely nothing interesting with the concept of alternate Lokis.
The only thing interesting they did was to cast Richard E. Grant. But, in terms of writing, yup. It was the most astonishingly boring, unimaginative take on “multiverses” that we’ve had in recent pop culture history (and we’ve had a LOT.)
The part that was so weird, was th set up was quite good. Loki is interrogated about his identity and motives and choices (is he narcissistic or self-loathing?), he is then confronted with many versions of himself. Seems like the perfect way to execute a character study on a grand scale. And then … nothing. Grant’s Loki actually worked because it was the only one that did attempt an alternate-universe character study.
Suck it.
Thanks for participating.
Thanks for sucking it.
I’m sorry that we disagree on a TV show, but is that an excuse to act like a complete jerk?I don’t think so.Reevaluate your life choices.
I accept your apology.
Exactly. The biggest movie currently in theaters is a movie about the multiverse that is a sequel to another wildly successful movie about the multiverse that, by the way, won the Oscar for Best Animated Picture. Oh, and last year’s Oscar-winner for Best Picture was yet another wildly successful picture about a multiverse. Meanwhile, “No Way Home” made a major fuckton of money; and “Multiverse of Madness” did just fine, thank you very much. So, if you write off every major example to the contrary, and lump in some films (“Ant-Man,” “Eternals”) that aren’t really about a multiverse, the evidence is quite compelling.
“If you ignore everything about it that is good, then it becomes obvious that it sucks.”
I thought if anything Guardians really showcased that the Gamora we knew is dead, and this version of her (or any character replaced by a multiverse stand-in) is not a resurrection, but simply someone with the same backstory but different motivations.
For all the talk about the Guardians being a closing chapter, Gunn punked out on any character deaths and the end credits say Star-Lord is coming back.
Every single character can come back for Guardians 4. It’s just a case of actor willingness and schedule, which is really just a case of money.
And there is still the world of animation to consider. Bautista and Saldana don’t have to put makeup on to do a What If episode or some other animated show.
Bizarrely, even though they got back almost every Marvel actor to voice their character in What If? Dave Bautista wasn’t one of them because as he said, “no one asked him”.
They don’t even need to get Bautista or Saldana for What If?. . I think Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan were some of the few live action actors to reprise their roles for that. Jordan at least has a history of doing voice work. Boseman was a total surprise. Honestly though, after 3 Guardians films, I think Nebula was the character with the best overall character development and arc. Rocket is a close second but most of his came from GotG3.
They don’t even need to get Bautista or Saldana for What If?. . I think Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan were some of the few live action actors to reprise their roles for that. Jordan at least has a history of doing voice work. Boseman was a total surprise. Most of the actors reprised their roles, with a few notable exceptions. Scanning through IMDB, these are the original actors I saw who voiced their characters in What If? Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, Benedict Cumberbatch, Frank Grillo, Danai Gurira, Tom Hiddleston, Toby Jones, Hayley Atwell, Jon Favreau, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Bettany, Karen Gillan, Chris Hemsworth, Clark Gregg, Sebastian Stan, John Kani, Jaime Alexander, Seth Green, Kurt Russell, Natalie Portman, Rachel McAdams, Michael Rooker, Benedict Wong, Tilda Swinton, Kat Dennings, Angela Bassett, Djimon Hounsou, Evangeline Lilly, Stanley Tucci, Georges St. Pierre, Paul Rudd, Josh Brolin, Jeff Goldblum, Andy Serkis, Dominic Cooper, Cobie Smulders, Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, Neal McDonough, Emily VanCamp, Sean Gunn, Carrie Coon, Clancy Brown,
I wouldn’t hang the lack of character deaths on Gunn. Marvel owns the characters, and they’re not going to let him Suicide Squad anyone without approval.Also, I guess maybe they think “Worst Chris” Pratt might be the secret sauce instead of Gunn? If so, bringing Star Lord back is worth a try.
A lot of bad faith arguments in this article, for sure. But the most egregious is the classic: “death not being permanent makes storytelling weightless and impossible.” That’s just comics, full stop. And they’ve been doing it for literally several decades.Any semi-serialized medium that constantly changes writers is going to do this. Soap operas are famous for it. Comic series are especially defined by a set status quo, so they have a strong incentive to do it. And being scifi/fantasy stories, they can explain it any way they want: the multiverse is one option, but it could be magic, time travel, cloning…the sky isn’t suddenly falling because one particular storytelling concept feels resonant right now.
THANK YOU. Was thinking this myself for the longest time. Back in the day, the only perma-death in comics that I recall was Gwen Stacy, and, well, even that was un-done, sorta. Hell, before they got all multiverse-y, fucking Endgame did the same damned think with time travel, undoing all of the death from Infinity War. I don’t like undoing death so much, regardless of the method, because it means there’s no jeopardy, but you can’t blame that on the multiverse.
And, as both Spider-Verse and GotG3 make clear: multiversal variants aren’t the same person. That’s what “variant” means. A character coming back that way DOES make their death permanent: the time-displaced Gamora is not the same Gamora who died. Alternate versions of Peter or Miles aren’t the same individuals. It’s relevant to the narrative how or why they are different.Per your point, Endgame is the one that un-did death. Everyone who was snapped back was resurrected just as they were through magic. And the Snap had almost nothing to do with the multiverse.
Everyone who was snapped back was resurrected just as they were through magic.
Of course, quite a few of those people died shortly thereafter, as the airplane they got snapped out of was no longer there… or the cruise ship, bus, automobile, et cetera… but we never hear about their stories.
Sure, and there’s the opposite: it’s been 5 years of desolation. Infrastructure has been totally decimated, the capacity for food production has atrophied, medical services and utility coverage and transit access and housing supply have contracted to reflect a smaller population.And then the Hulk snaps his fingers, and 4 Billion people re-appear out of thin air. Now everyone is fucked. The Flag Smashers were supposedly all about this, but they really did a bad job articulating their point.
Because that’s not what happened. Word of God is that Hulk wished for them to return safely, so those in airplanes, etc. returned to the nearest safe place.
Once upon a time, the only dead people in comics who stayed dead were Uncle Ben, Barry Allen, and Bucky. I don’t think Ben’s come back in a “this is real,” main continuity version, but the other two certainly have, several times over.
End Game and Infinity War killed off three characters who are almost certainly never coming back in the form we know them (Iron Man, Black Widow, and Captain America). Dr. Strange also had us deal with the deaths of a bunch of characters who may not be in our main storyline but the implications are that the other universe is now left without those characters (I really liked this dark touch). I don’t know it’s fair to say as the article does that Marvel is trivializing stakes.
Yeah, this smacks of starting with an argument and reverse engineering evidence. “Well, I’m sick of this multiverse stuff and, uh, the underperformance of The Eternals proves that everyone else is sick of it too!”
It’s not box office poison, but this multi-verse shit is why I’ve pretty much checked-out of everything MCU/DC (bar the beauty that are the Spider-Verse films). The absolute highlight of the MCU post-Endgame was Scarlett Witch decimating The Illuminati… my god did that put a smile on my face. This multi-verse bullshit just screams fan-service to me, and watching it get obliterated in a matter of minutes was fantastic.
No Way Home sucked…it really wasn’t a good movie at all.
Isn’t this the same guy who said the character-resurrecting Fast & Furious franchise didn’t show any sign of slowing down?
At least comic-book multiverse bullshit is straightforward and honest about what it is. The Han shit in that franchise was preposterous: three movies of bending time and space to give a dead character more screen time, and then figuring, let’s just say he never died, because family never dies I guess. Unless they do?
Man is this ever some disingenuous trash. Cherry picking examples and all. I think my favorite part is this:
“When Ant-Man and company spend an entire movie taking down a Big Bad like Kang the Conqueror, how much should we care if five minutes later the end credits scene reminds us Kang variants are stocked up like Campbell’s soup cans in the multiversal limbo-land they call home?”Yes, this is the point of Kang. It’s what separates him from other villains generally. Sure you occasionally get a “we pulled in a bonus Thanos from some other timeline” but with Kang, that’s the whole dang idea. A new solution beyond beating him up will be required, and by the end of this storyline, I can virtually assure you that it won’t end on another pan across a sea of Kangs, instead you’ll watch them all wink out of existence at once or something.
It’s also worthy of note that GOTG3 ALSO has timeline shenanigans in it. That’s not the original flavor Gamora in there, she’s from bonus Thanos times. I feel like you’re projecting why people liked that movie, when “It’s the capstone to a pretty well loved trilogy” is sort of the Occam’s Razor you’re trying real hard not to notice.
There’s also the attempt up top to lump a few Marvel movies that aren’t really “Multiverse” – I get that noone really saw The Eternals, don’t blame them, it wasn’t a good movie. But a multiverse movie? Other than the fact that it’s likely that the only Marvel movie to reference the events was Spider Man and Sony’s version, it stayed pretty squarely in “this” world.
Also remind me which of the MCU TV shows were getting a second season, was it the various ones that aren’t about multiverse stuff or the two that are extensively about multiverse stuff? Oh, it was Loki and What If? Wild! Truly wild.
it’s funny because in many ways i agree with the basic premise (there are too many multiverse stories in comic book movies) but i disagree with basically every point trying to back it up.nary a mention of the fact that marvel hired way too many rick and morty writers? might be a SMALL reason we got here.
Look, I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who think like this. I’ve seen the basic complaint that death has no meaning in multiverse stories trotted out hundreds of times in a dozen different ways. And without presenting a whole TED Talk on why I think this fundamentally misunderstands stories, let’s just resolve it by saying that’s perfectly fine if you think that, but I don’t think death has some radical meaning in real life, so I don’t need it to in to do so in my stories.
A prepubescent Yellowfoot once picked up a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and started reading it even though it was well beyond his skill level. When he got halfway through and Gandalf died, he lost his shit. It was maybe the first major character death he had to deal with. The very first thing he did once he calmed down a little was start frantically searching through the rest of the book for evidence that it would be reversed. When that didn’t work, he picked up The Two Towers and kept looking. When he found what he suspected, that Gandalf wasn’t really dead (spoilers), he breathed a huge sigh of relief and went back to reading. His death at Khazad-dûm wasn’t undercut by this knowledge, because it was just part of the story. It was no less a sacrifice just because he came back later, because he still died saving his friends. Inasmuch meaning as there is in such a death, it was only made sweeter upon his return.
doesn’t your second paragraph kind of undermine your point?his death mattered so much so you had to make sure it was undone before you could continue.
Yeah, it mattered to ten-year-old me a lot. I edited out a paragraph about how teenage me read A Game of Thrones and reacted with a mere “wow” to Ned Stark’s death. Although really, my point was not that story deaths aren’t affecting (of course they are), but that subsequent resurrections don’t somehow erase those feelings you felt before. Tony’s death was very moving in Endgame. If he shows up again somehow, that could be cool, but even if it’s not, it won’t lessen that moment, not my memory of the first time I saw it, and not any time I might watch that scene in the future.
tony was given reverence for sure, but i would say even within those two avengers movies – the blipping of everyone and gamora’s death – didn’t really track for me at all. i was more interested in how they were gonna undo them than i was effected by their ‘deaths’ emotionally.‘i don’t feel so good mr stark’ is a nice moment, but considering i knew another spider-man movie was filming at the same time, it didn’t really do anything.but, that’s a problem with comic book/fantasy/sci-fi storytelling in general, not just multiverse stuff specifically.
Even the blip “deaths” had a lot of emotional weight for me, because I saw them through the eyes of the characters witnessing them. Obviously we know that they’re coming back, but they don’t know that, so I can feel their horror at the proceedings. This even carried through past Endgame, for flashbacks like Yelena’s fear and confusion after being blipped in Hawkeye.Fundamentally though, I agree that it’s the genre that most often causes this issue, or more accurately, the volume of work it often demands. Comics have been running dozens of stories for decades. It’s only natural for them to have to dip back into their past successes to keep stories going that long, and it’s consequently only natural that the effect of that accumulates over time. What this article is ascribing to the multiverse is really just a complaint about the fact that the MCU is no longer new, and so each story has to stand on its own merits, just like comics have had to do for most of their lifespan. And still, they’ve mostly gotten away with telling a whole lot of pulp with an occasional gem in between.
yeah, exactly. as great and fun as the interconnected universe can be, there are also lots of downsides and after a decade of reaping there’s a bit of sowing now. there’s a reason the most recent batman movie, in a universe with just batman in it was, if not refreshing, at least a nice diversion.
This point is the crux of it for me. When a character we know will come back dies, what’s affecting us how that loss is shown in the world of the story.
Seven year old me when reading LOTR freaked-out when Gandalf died. Gandalf is the wisest and most powerful member of the Fellowship, how could he possibly die! Like you, that was my first experience with a major character death in a novel. I was upset enough that my mom caved and told me he eventually comes back, and I was happy. I did not at the age of seven give a flying flip about “realism” and I didn’t want any of the Fellowship to die.
Premise is…fine…but the reinforcement could use work, considering multiversal superhero movies have wildly succeeded more than they’ve tepidly “failed.”
I’m just glad they’re still doing real articles every once in a while.
Eternals’ audience score was 77 percent. Ant-Man 3’s was 83 percent. Dr. Strange 2 – the one this guy says most viewers hate, is 85 percent.
This really boils down to critics lashing out to find relevance when franchises no longer need or want their input.
Also, just ONCE, I wish people would remember the fucking source material here. No one stays dead in the comics. When the fuck did we ever want “resonance” in a comic book?I find it laughable that some of the same critics who bitch about a villain problem in the MCU would try to shit on a concept that could give us more Jeff Bridges, Michael B. Jordan or Cate Blanchett or could give us a chance to have Guy Pearce, James Spader or Mads Mikkelsen get another shot at it after movies that didn’t give them much to do.
Bring on the multiverse. Give it all. I was pissed we didn’t get Nicholas Hammond in No Way Home. I’m ready for the Gruffuddassaince and have him play Reed again. WHERE IS THE BENDER OF FASS!!!!!???
I have a raging, throbbing, pulsating, vein-popping fanhood and I want it serviced. Fuck your resonance and service me.
“box-office poison”Across the Spider-Verse made $120 million its opening weekend. What the fuck are you talking about?
Ray Greene surely has a finger on the pulse of America.
It’s like pointing to Dracula: Dead and Loving It and saying it’s proof that vampire movies are box office poison.
I get your point, but I also get the article’s point. It’s not that that genre in general has become box office poison, but that audiences have grown tired of that flavor of that genre, so it needs to rest for a while until someone comes up with a fresh take on it.Using your example of vampire movies with the article’s example of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (great movie, by the way), the Universal horror vampire movie style died out for about 10 years until Hammer Studios revived it with Christopher Lee’s run as Dracula, with full color, including that unnaturally red blood, and more sexualized vampires. Then that became stale, so Polanski parodied it in The Fearless Vampire Killers. Another pause leads to a brief revival in the 1970s of Dracula as brooding lover and anti-hero (most famously as portrayed by Frank Langella). When that got stale, we moved on to rock star vampires who are anyone BUT Dracula, often with some degree of comedy mixed in. (The 80s really liked their vampire comedies.) And so on.
Maybe put away the Underoos and move on from childish claptrap like superhero movies?
Dad get out of my ROOM
They may not be your cup of tea (or mine, as I’m largely coming up “Meh” about most superhero stuff), but they are the biggest thing in movies right now, and this is a website about pop culture. If you’re looking for in-depth reviews of indie films, maybe go to a site specifically focusing on that?
I’m not looking for in depth reviews of indie films, I’m lamenting the fact that pretty much every fucking movie is some variation on super heroes. How boring.
oh noz the death of cinema like Jaws 2 and Mrs Doubtfire
Neither were superhero movies so yeah, swing and a miss.
but both were huge mainstream appeal blockbusters in an era where mainstream appeal blockbusters ruled the box office and directly followed the scaled-back and the artsy New Hollywood era that catered more to adults than general audiences which is basically the same “superheroes bad” argument people make now
I don’t know, dude. I’ve seen every superhero movie released so far this year, and they amount to about 12% of the total movies I’ve seen, which is about 43 so far. That’s not a bad slice, but it’s not that much either. As genres go, I’ve seen more period pieces than superheros.
These movies suck up all the oxygen in the room. It’s like all over us like a pillowcase.
I think you might be wearing your pillowcases wrong
Indeed, pre-pandemic Hollywood was producing 800+ movies a year, and maybe a dozen of them, at most, were superhero movies.
Claptrap lol. Are you 90 years old?
Yeah, while the premise of the article may be true (multiverses are confusing and annoying), the examples given are weak and contradictory, and probably better explained by superhero fatigue and just an overall drop in quality as creatives are spread too thin. It’s OK to just not like something and say that! You don’t need box office numbers or metacritic or whatever to justify your feelings! Based on how much multiversal storytelling has been an integral part of comics since the silver age before exploding in the ‘80s and 90s with the various mega-crossovers, there was no way the film universes could avoid it forever. My only question at this point is whether Marvel will use the end of this saga to keep what’s working, and then recast and reboot all of the heroes that have aged out or gotten too expensive. The current movies and shows are trying to introduce legacy characters via children and proteges, and nearly all of these kids have been charmless potatoes (Ms. Marvel being an exception, IMO).
I like the Stephen Baxter Manifold: series multiverse myself. The Harry Turtledove multiverse is pretty awesome too.
That reminds me, I should really get around to finishing the last Timeline-191 series…One of my favorite time-travel/multiple-realities books is The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan.
Multiverse movies are popular at the moment because we appear to be living in one of the darker timelines, and it’s comforting to think there are better timelines out there. Audiences want to see Tobey Maguire and Michael Keaton suit up again because most of our lives were better in the 90s and 00s. The multiverse conceit does not lower the stakes of the story because there is invariably a distinction made for “our” variant of each character, who can die permanently even if there exist multiple variants.My five year old son understood that “our” Miles Morales is stuck on Earth-42 and that the Earth-42 version of Miles is not the real Miles. It definitely matters if something happens to our Miles that we went on the journey with.Ant Man 3 isn’t even really a multiverse movie. People didn’t like it because the whole movie was shot on a green screen in Atlanta with backdrops from Strange World. The multiverse only really comes into play in the mid credits scene, which comes about two hours after the audience has lost interest.
I’ve been thinking something similar: why are multiverse stories so big right now? And I agree, it feels like our current reality is this fractured, arbitrary thing. Everything is going badly, and every couple of days or weeks there’s some event that feels entirely preventable or changeable, or some outcome in our lives we didn’t want that seems like it shouldn’t have happened.Earth-42 Miles really crystalized the other part of it, for me: our circumstances do make us unique, none of us are replaceable. But also, every one of our identities are just as arbitrary, just as mutable based on random chance. Privilege or lack thereof, random choice playing out however it did, indifferent statistics changing our lives. Spider-Man is really ripe for the exploration, because his lore is built around chance. A chance encounter with the radioactive spider, a confluence of random events that kills Uncle Ben, a rogue’s gallery of villains whose lives were changed forever by accidents.Miles-1610 gets into Visions Academy by lottery, lucks into having a dad who loves him, and becomes a hero. Miles-42 lives in a hell reality, where his dad is dead, and he became a villain. “Our” Miles is special, but Miles-42 was once exactly like him, until he wasn’t.
Multiverse stories used to be considered a really niche thing that was too convoluted for the general public outside of diehard SF/Fantasy fans. Even in SF/Fantasy, most multiverse stories in comics were secluded in their respective universes and shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who (with some exceptions) only touched on the multiverse in a couple of episodes/story arcs and left the bulk of its multiverse stories for books and audio adaptations.
Then stuff like Rick & Morty and Into the Spiderverse came around, and suddenly producers realized that multiverse stories aren’t nearly as confusing to the public as they thought.
If you’d told high school 00’s me that the days of bling rap, bad CGI and rampant paranoia and islamophobia would be comforting in comparison to the 20’s imminent climate and economic collapse, ever-present shootings and domestic terrorism I’d be shocked.
But it’s true. Those were simpler times.
Also, to be momentarily on topic, Spiderverse has beautifully executed its multiverse concept in both films so far, and I’m a skeptic of multiverses.
mid credits scene, which comes about two hours after the audience has lost interest.That is one perfect description of my Ant-Man 3 experience.
I just watched “Ant-Man 3″ and I didn’t like it because:1. Modok. Good God. Don’t ever do that again Marvel.2. For the supposed Big Bad of this entire Phase and thus the narrative heir to Thanos, I didn’t really think Kang was all that interesting. I didn’t find him very compelling in “Loki” either (which I mostly enjoyed) so this isn’t just an “Ant-Man” script issue. Maybe the recasting for this part that I assume is coming will help.
Aww.I thought Modok was the best part of Ant Man 3. He killed me.
Not to sound pedantic, but this article conflates causation and correlation.Marvel movies are focusing on the multiverse now, that’s true. However, the recent downturn in Marvel’s fortunes has nothing to do with the mutiverse concept. Instead, it’s all about how the quality of the movies has declined.Consider Love and Thunder and Eternals. Neither are multiverse movies. Neither did well. Neither are good movies. They suffer from actor bloat, unfocused plots, and other issues. Was that also true of Quantumania and Multiverse of Madness? Yes to all points except they are multiverse movies.Now consider the other side of the coin: No Way Home and GOTG3. Both did well. Both are good movies. One is multiverse-based, one is not.Conclusion: it’s not the multiverse concept that is dragging Marvel down. It’s a decline in quality.
“Love and Thunder” did well enough at getting people to watch it. Far better than it deserved for sure, because it was terrible. I thought “Eternals” was just kind of drab, but Thor actively annoyed the hell out of me its entire runtime.
Because admit it. You’re already sick of the multiverse—What I’m really sick of is clickbait articles that purport to tell me what I’m sick of.
I was just thinking the other day about how different modern pop culture would be if John Broome and Carmine Infantino hadn’t decided to show Barry Allen reading a Golden Age Flash comic in Showcase #4. Had that one panel not been included then when they decided to bring back the Golden Age characters (which they almost certainly would eventually have done) they would probably have just shown them to be a group of heroes that were 10-20 years older than the then-current ones who lived in the same world and time period. I have no doubt that the concept of multiple universes would have ended up getting some use in comics, but it would never have been nearly so central to everything. Hell, when I was reading comics in the 80’s and early 90’s Marvel, outside of stories dealing with Kang, almost never did things about parallel timelines. So everything would probably be a lot more like that, with multiverse stories being something that occasionally shows up in pop culture, rather than an integral part of so much.
I was pissed we didn’t get Nicholas Hammond in No Way Home.
I’ve been pissed about that since Tobey Maguire was webbing off in his room in 2002.
Nailed it! Much as I like where you can go (as a writer) with a multiverse approach is proving out to be a bit of a killjoy. I enjoyed DSMOM as I felt it did touch on who Steven Strange (and the Scarlett Witch) are and how their reach across time and space is mind-boggling. Scarlett Witch, in particular, was shown to be the terrifying character she becomes in the comics. But Quantumania just felt like a ‘this is bigger and scarier!’ kind of move by Marvel and it backfired. GOTG3 worked splendidly for sure and left the RIGHT doors open to move storylines and characters forward. To be honest, Marvel had a tremendous task following up on the Endgame build-up and, IMHO, they do deserve a bit of room for misfiring. The key for Marvel is moving forward from the multiverse ‘madness’ if you will.
Overly Sarcastic Productions over on YouTube recently did a video on this very topic, and basically, their consensus was that it CAN work, but not often, and you have to handle it very carefully.
Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein literally finished off the very first cinematic universe: Because Pedantry—Abbott and Costello finished off the second cinematic universe. Dracula’s Daughter finished off the first one, not because it was a bad movie (it’s actually really good, and surprisingly transgressive for a post-Code film!), but because audience interest had shifted away from horror for a time. By the time Universal tried again with Son of Frankenstein they’d started in on their “Monster Mash” phase, combining creatures in the same film: Igor the Hunchback, played by Bela Lugosi, was considered a second “monster” by Universal, partly thanks to who played him and partly to give audiences more bang for their buck).
I don’t think GOTG3 proves anything except that if you make a good MCU movie it’ll be more successful than the lesser quality ones. It has nothing to do with multiverses and very little to do with super hero fatigue either. Lots of people seem to be willing to watch good MCU movies no matter how many are made. There is a little lowering of stakes I guess but as this article points out multiverses have been an integral feature of comics for a long time, not just in an explicit way either but various things like The Ultimates, etc, so it fits.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was great and luckily for the Multiverse of Madness, I saw it the day before and gave it 2/5.Had I seen it the day after EEAAO, I would have given MoM zero out of 5 as EEAAO really showed it up for the creatively bankrupt exercise that it was.(I mean, Everything Everywhere All at Once had more multiverse and more madness than the actual Multiverse of Madness for starters!)
All that 80s infinitemultiworlduniverse stuff was dreamed up to boost comic book sales – forcing readers to buy multiple titles to follow a story. It really killed the creativity across the board by severely limiting what creators could do. Book sales did increase but (imho) most of it was a dreary, unreadable mess. When Hollywood finally started going whole hog on superhero movies they naturally gravitated towards the best-selling title from a few decades ago. If Hollywood could figure out a way to make limited-edition, foil-embossed hologram movies bagged and boarded, they’d jump on that too.
If Hollywood could figure out a way to make limited-edition,
foil-embossed hologram movies bagged and boarded, they’d jump on that
too.They’re called Snyder Cuts and they never increase in value.
I take the opposite view and get to the same point. Multiverses are in danger not because of the failures, but because of the successes. In pop culture, especially in movies, Highlander rules apply “There can be only one.” After the success of “Independence Day”, every studio jumped into “disaster porn”. At its height we had two volcano based disasters “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano”, all trying to feed the fickle apatite of moviegoers as quickly as possible. And those movies soon nosedived hitting rock bottom with “Godzilla” After the success of X-men and then Spider-man, there were tons of grounded superheroes from the early 2000’s we all memory-holed. Ghost-rider, Punisher, Daredevil, all of it bottoming out with Elektra. But Highlander Rules create only two possible outcomes. Either you surpass the king… or you don’t. Neither, the studios nor the entertainment press care if you come in second, third or a respectable fourth. In the disaster subgenre, its ID4 AND the rest. In the grounded superheroes, it’s Wolverine AND then the rest. For multiverse, the Highlander is shaping up to be Spider-verse and then the rest. (As an aside: who else wondered if briefly “American Born Chinese” was an accessory to “Everything Everywhere…”)Spider-verse is the one to beat because it shows the most creativity. Most dimension hopping is limited in the binary ‘evil twin’ scenario. But a dimension with a web-slinging T-Rex? or a Spider-buggy? or the video game you just picked up? It stretches the concept in ways that leave others racing to catch up. Evil Dr. Strange? Alright. A Dr. Strange that rifts on Cumberbatches previous roles? Better. A Dr. Strange that is a host of a monster-movie marathon on an independent station fighting to put those monsters back in their movies with the aid of frog Thor and Kitty Pryde? Now you’ve got something. But even then its not enough to unseat Spiderverse.
I think this is only a little holiday in the multiverse, and it’ll be wrapped in a nice tiny bow by the time they get to The Mutant Saga (or whatever). There will be some kind of restrictions brought in to stop all the dimension-hopping.I agree with the premise of the article, but also feel they could’ve done so much more with the concept than they have. Spiderverse just underlines how unimaginative the live action movies and TV has been.
Yesterday I was full of big thoughts for a long-winded rebuttal of this argument, but today I’m feeling lazy so I’ll just do unconnected points and try to keep them brief.1) Unlike novels, comic books are a medium that is sometimes driven not by story, but by art. A whole continuity can be created because some artist got sick of drawing the same Batman model for the 2000th time and put him in a 1950s spacesuit instead, and that picture was so damned cool that it inspired others to riff on it and fill out enough details for a 24-page punch-‘em-up that a lot of Batman fans will buy because look at that cool picture, and some will buy because they need to know the antecedents of Space Captain Bruce Batman, Defender of Gotham-7. If a suitably inspired writer gets hold of it, the sky is the limit. My point being that fretting about whether this is all going to make sense and say something profound seems a little bit silly: comics don’t always have to do that, and neither do Cinematic Universes based on comics, if you ask me.2) But maybe they do say something profound. Because I have never understood this idea that the death of Tony Stark or Ben Parker or Nora Allen somehow “doesn’t matter” if there’s another one out there in some other universe. Do you love your grandpa because he was the ONE AND ONLY your grandpa in all of creation, or do you love him because you’ve spent your life with him and built a relationship of shared experiences and affection? And when he dies, hasn’t something irreplaceable been lost, regardless of the existence of any number of “equal and original” counterparts elsewhere?
(I have similar problems with “clones threaten my uniqueness” arguments, so I guess it’s just something I’m not getting.)3) The multiverse forces us to confront the idea that each of us is equal and irreplaceable, no matter what we look like or how we choose to live. Into the Spider-Verse in particular makes this point fantastically well, using different styles of animation to immerse us completely in strange worlds that nevertheless all contain villains of great menace and heroes that rise up to challenge them. And the multiverse challenges us to understand that whether the hero looks like a cartoon pig, an Afro-Latino kid from Brooklyn, or a 2-door sedan named Peter Parkedcar doesn’t matter — what matters is that they protect the helpless and make great sacrifices in service of others. Heroism can be found anywhere. A skinny teenager. A pteranodon body-swapped into a T-Rex. Maybe even you!None of this isn’t to say that bad, creatively bankrupt multiverse stories can’t be written — and badly written crap is a chore to read or watch no matter what it’s trying to say. But “multiverses are stupid and I hate them!” is kind of an extreme reaction, and definitely not a consensus view among people watching comic book movies, good or bad.
I don’t disagree with your basic premise – the “multiverse” undercuts dramatic tension since you know there’s always an alt-Gamora or alt-Thanos or alt-Kang to take a character’s place – but (at least for now) you’re wrong to say that it hasn’t been working for Marvel.No Way Home was a mega-hit.Spider-Verse 1 and 2.5 are mega-hits.Doctor Strange did pretty well.And then Ant-Man… isn’t even a multiverse movie, not really?
but even in the case of Gamora it shows the value in these kinds of stories because her whole arc with Star-Lord in GOTG 3 is him learning to accept that “his” Gamora is dead and just because another Gamora exists in his universe now, he can’t replicate what he had with her because she’s a fundamentally different person after skipping straight to the Endgame final boss bottle and not having any of her initial character development
While I kinda agree in principle – infinite universes just leads to infinite bullshit – these things are making a ton of money and aren’t slowing down. This is like writing a “superhero fatigue” article in 2013.
No, bad writing is box-office poison.
This is a weird article for many reasons but particularly given that a huge emotional thread in GotG is Star Lord finally accepting Gamora’s death and realizing that the alternate timeline Gamora is not her and can’t just be slotted back in her place.
“what GOTG3 really confirms is that the multiverse—the whole organizing principle behind the still-emergent Marvel Phase Four multi-film story arc—is box office poison.”
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, Ray.
There I just saved you guys reading this dumb article. Because how could a film unrelated to the multiverse prove this?
How much do these AV staffers get paid now since the move from Chicago? These have gotta be scabs…. my highschool English teacher would tear this article to shreds.
Also, Quantumania is the first film in Phase Five.
If you’re like most viewers, you actively disliked the multiverse in the fulsomely named Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and you truly hated it by the time the equally tongue-twisting Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania arrived.
CITATION NEEDED
Consider the possibility that the movies will be fine because the writers have more imagination and are better than you.
I think fatigue with Marvel in general, and with Jonathan Majors in particular, is more to blame for many of the complaints named above than the flaws of the multiverse trope as a plot device. Phase 4 (or whatever corporate storytelling epoch we’re currently living through) has been deeply unfocused and produced some real stinkers.And where Majors is concerned, I never grasped his appeal as Hollywood’s It Guy in the first place, and have found his portrayals of Kang dull and often distracting (e.g. his bizarre, seemingly arbitrary line readings in Loki). Add the “controlling abuser” revelations into the mix and, well, you’ve got yourself a stew (a hearty pot of Get This Man Out of My Ettou-Face).
when someone writes an article and has never read any marvel or dc comic and starts talking about the multiverse like they are some kind of rick sanchez. without the multiverse there would be no marvel zombies, no battleworld, no batman who laughs, no bad guy superman. the multiverse is what keeps feeding stories and also the characters are not the same, they all have their own unique stories and lives and replacing with one would not be like replacing with the other.
“death has no meaning and every hero or villain can be resurrected”
So comic books. And for some reason you think it’s bad for comic book movies to do what comic books have always done?
I really don’t know how people keep track of this franchise. It’s getting…maybe even beyond…even Star Wars confusion.
Lol. You guys keep saying shit like “it means deaths don’t matter!” but so far in every MCU story, the deaths HAVE mattered and no one’s come back or come back as the same person.
This is bad writing, a poor understanding of the last couple years of releases and an example of poor media literacy.Brava.
not to be whatever about it but besides NWH cause that’s a different case (and Gamora in GOTG, but even then that version of her is very different than the original one) what other MCU or DC project has really brought back dead characters and undermined their deaths in a significant way when characters die in those universes they’re usually dead for good? like Zod in The Flash isn’t gonna be a permanent return, he’s very obviously going to be dead again by the end of the movie